Haunted Wisconsin

by Michael Norman

  The family had concluded early on that Henry was somehow responsible for the turmoil—either by natural or supernatural means. The phenomena always occurred in Henry’s presence and the flying objects seemed to travel toward the child. His family reasoned that if the child were removed from the house and the strange events continued, perhaps then “electricity,” or something other than Henry anyway, was the cause after all.

  Thus it was that Henry was sent to stay at the homes of his uncles Hans and Andrew Lunde in the settlement of Springdale. Henry spent one day at Hans’s house during which only a few small items took flight. But it was a far different story later at Andrew’s home. No sooner had Henry walked in the door than a pail of water began spinning, then spilled across the kitchen floor. After the mess had been mopped up, Henry spied a mirror on the wall. “You’d better take that down,” he warned. Andrew laughed. A moment later, the mirror crashed to the floor.

  Meanwhile, all was peaceful at the Lunde home in Mount Horeb. Rather than take this as a sign that little Henry had been the source of the mischief, Mrs. Lunde insisted that there must be a supernatural explanation. A Mount Horeb cheesemaker told her that in the Old Country a bag of salt was the time-honored “remedy” to exorcise evil spirits. Accordingly, she sent word to Springdale, and Andrew Lunde put a small bag of salt in Henry’s pocket.

  But that didn’t seem to work. A neighbor boy who came over to play was hit in the face by the salt bag when it supposedly flew out of Henry’s pocket. Later a set of marbles the boys were playing with disappeared. Henry found them hidden around the house, even a few tucked deeply between bed quilts.

  Andrew tried an experiment after the neighbor boy left. He put Henry in a chair and then held a cigar box full of marbles in front of him. The marbles leaped from the box, though the uncle swore Henry could not have touched them.

  That night Henry complained about noises coming from the wall next to his bed. His uncle took a look around but could find nothing to explain the sounds. The next morning, however, Andrew found a large hole in the plaster wall next to Henry’s bed. By this time, Uncle Andrew was tired of the problems his nephew was causing and talked his brother Hans into taking him back to Mount Horeb.

  “I took a basket of eggs along and set them on a chair in the house,” Hans later said. “While we were standing there one egg flew out of the basket and struck Henry in the face. I saw it leave the basket with my own eyes. There was no one anywhere near the basket. Two more eggs jumped out … on the floor and one jumped off the table.”

  Physician and Spiritualist Dr. George Kingsley of Madison also examined Henry. The Spiritualist movement in Wisconsin was still quite renowned at that time with a major center in Whitewater. During the short time Henry was in Dr. Kingsley’s office, the doctor pronounced the boy a “splendid medium” for his age, destined to become one of the world’s “greatest Spiritualists.” He said that although the boy did not yet have the “spirits” under control, he would gain power over them later on.

  Other clairvoyants were more specific in their assessment of the child. Some claimed they saw three spirits—two women and one man—hovering near him. They did not explain who the spirits were. Henry’s mother recalled that when her son was quite small, two female Spiritualists had cared for him, one of whom later died. Some people thought she had passed her supernatural powers on to Henry before her death.

  The seers also said that the three spirits were “oppressed” by crowds; for that reason, the manifestations never occurred when Henry was in school or when large groups of people came to the house.

  But the Lundes came to another, even more amazing, conclusion. They told Mert P. Peavy, then editor of the Dodgeville Chronicle, that Henry had been hypnotized by someone and left in a trance.

  If many accepted the notion that Henry was possessed of strange, supernatural powers, others did not. Henry’s family had consulted a number of physicians in addition to Dr. Kingsley after they noted he seemed to be running a high fever and was losing weight. His mother said he was also experiencing mood swings; at times he would not talk to anyone.

  Among those who concluded Henry was a fake were Dr. N. C. Evans and former sheriff G. E. Mickelson. The two men visited the Lundes one night at the peak of the excitement. They were seated with their backs to the kitchen doorway when two pieces of sausage, a bar of soap, and several chunks of coal flew into the room from the direction of the kitchen. They knew Henry was in the kitchen. Dr. Evans whirled around and asked Henry, who stood in the doorway, if he had thrown the articles. The boy did not give a direct answer. Instead, he hid in the kitchen because, as his grandparents said, he was “shy.”

  On another evening, Dr. Evans was in the sitting room and Henry was again in the kitchen. Suddenly a ball of yarn sailed into the room. The doctor was convinced that Henry had thrown it from the kitchen.

  Another medical man at the time, Dr. Clarke Gapen, was asked for his opinion on the case.

  “It is nonsense to waste any time on such cases unless it be to explode or expose them,” Dr. Gapen was quoted as saying. “They can always be explained away and have been time and again exposed.”

  However, churchmen in the community were far less certain. A prayer meeting was held at the Lunde house to exorcise the demons, but, according to those present, the services only resulted in an increase in the phenomena.

  What are we to believe in the case of Henry James Brophy?

  Parapsychologists insist that many cases such as his cannot be explained away and that young children are often the focus of poltergeist activity. Some research suggests that children unconsciously create such disturbances in order to vent repressed hostility. That may make some sense in this case. Henry had lived with his grandparents since he was two years old. The loss of daily contact with his natural mother and her remarriage may have had a negative effect upon him that was then unconsciously expressed by propelling objects through the air.

  It was also noted that as a baby, Henry had been struck by a horse-drawn wagon. Although he had mostly recovered from his crippling injuries, he remained delicate and sickly throughout his childhood. Poltergeist activity has sometimes been attributed to youngsters with histories of physical weaknesses.

  Henry left Mount Horeb sometime around 1914 or 1915. No one is quite certain what happened to him in later years. Some thought he had married and moved to California, others that he had left for Madison or perhaps Milwaukee.

  In the years that followed the Brophy case, community opinion was strongly divided about its authenticity. One local woman who knew Henry and the Lundes, Josie Evans, thought the whole thing was a fraud. Her brother, Jake Evans, thought it had perhaps been real. They both agreed that neither really knew what had gone on. Another resident at the time, Mabel Espeseth, said many of the stories were “made up.” She later lived in the old Lunde house and claimed that she had never given a thought to supernatural activity. But Jan Kogen, who also later lived in the house, recalled that strange things did happen—she said a camera the family owned kept taking pictures on its own and finally had to be replaced.

  The only point on which all agree is this: Henry James Brophy created a sensation more than a century ago in that little town west of Madison. Wittingly or not, Henry built a memorial to himself that no one who knew him or of him has ever forgotten.

  Always Time for Ghosts

  The premiere ghost hunter in southwest Wisconsin should be expected to have had at least a few supernatural experiences. In this respect, writer and folklorist Dennis Boyer does not disappoint the expectant listener: he has ghosts skulking about his own farm near Dodgeville.

  Boyer lives on the mile-and-a-half-long Bethlehem Road, he said by way of setting the scene at his home. It’s a dirt road that doesn’t have much else along it except the abandoned Bethlehem Lutheran Cemetery. The church that used to be there burned down a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still activity there … of a sort.

  “One day as
I passed that cemetery [ I ] saw a young woman who looked to be in a lace nightgown out in the middle of the cemetery, kneeling down. Now, I can’t say that what went through my mind was ‘ghost,’ but it seemed like an odd occurrence. What was she doing out there? It was toward dusk, but there was sufficient light to see.”

  Boyer soon discovered that the out-of-place woman in the cemetery might in fact have been a ghost. A neighbor told him that some sixty years earlier a young woman who had been incarcerated for some reason in a nearby county-owned facility escaped and sought refuge in the now-vanished church next to the cemetery. She is thought to have been responsible for burning it down.

  The other ghost frequenting Boyer’s neighborhood is an irascible old man who some believe is Tommy Lee, an early pioneer who farmed and fished.

  “People see an older man,” Boyer said about the sightings in his farm’s woodlot. “It’s taken on a life of its own. About a dozen people have seen him in the woods wearing his old blue coat.”

  Alas, Boyer has yet to catch a glimpse of that apparition.

  For a man who has been an avid listener to people’s stories for most of his life and a serious collector of ghost stories and folktales for nearly two decades, Boyer is not terribly surprised to encounter specters so close to home.

  “I’m open to a lot of different possibilities. I don’t know what the explanation of these things might be. Who knows? Maybe science will provide some of the answers. But ghost stories are one of the most durable forms of folklore.”

  Boyer grew up in a Pennsylvania Mennonite family with a tradition of storytelling dating back several hundred years. Many of the stories he heard as a child were from his coal miner grandfather who enthralled his grandson with tales of apparitions still hanging about long after the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars in the eighteenth century. Boyer had ancestors in both those conflicts.

  But a pivotal experience in his childhood came to be the defining moment in his lifelong pursuit of American folk stories. Boyer was in the first grade. He had just learned about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington when his grandmother took him to see her own great-aunt who was over one hundred years old at the time and living in a nursing home.

  The older woman started reminiscing about her father taking her down in the direction of Philadelphia to see Lincoln’s funeral train pass by. She talked about the African American freemen and the Union soldiers crying in the rain as the bands played.

  “She had a vivid memory of that time,” Boyer explained. “That really struck me because it was such a very long time ago. But she was there! That impressed me.”

  Boyer says his great-great-aunt noted his astonishment.

  “Then she talked about how her own grandfather told her about seeing the Pennsylvania Militia escort Washington away from the Continental Congress on that same road her father had taken her to see the funeral train.”

  Even though he was a young child, Boyer found himself profoundly moved by the woman’s stories. He set off on a course that would include successful careers in law and in lobbying, as a social activist and environmental preservationist, but all the while maintaining an abiding avocational interest in documenting the stories, legends, and folk beliefs of ordinary people, and then sharing them with the wider world through his writing.

  Although Boyer has a broad interest in all sorts of folklore, ghost stories are among his favorites, especially those that occur in the open countryside, far away from the traditional haunted mansions of legend. Many of Boyer’s best stories come from men and women responsible for enforcing hunting and fish regulations. He said conservation wardens “see everything.” If someone has seen odd creatures in the swamps, or spotted UFOs hovering over a lake, someone has told the region’s DNR (Department of Natural Resources) officers. Boyer has found the officers to be “wonderful” storytellers themselves.

  Unfortunately, conservation officers also end up as the supernatural subjects in some stories. Boyer knows of one “warden ghost” and another legendary specter of a “warden’s special,” that is, an auxiliary conservation officer. Both ghosts are from northern Wisconsin, above what Boyer and others have termed the “tension line,” a boundary sometimes placed along U.S. Highway 8, which slices across the top quarter of the state from St. Croix Falls in the west to Iron Mountain in the Upper Peninsula near Lake Michigan. North of there, the character of supernatural tales seems to change. He said the highway might also be called the “story line.”

  “Things are kind of pastoral south of there, in a rural sense. North of there stories get edgier; either they have macabre content or they incorporate themes that may not necessarily be supernatural but are the source of some discomfort and dissatisfaction.”

  Some northern ghost stories even contain what might be termed “political” content. The storytellers have complaints about government or big business, and those gripes are incorporated into the stories they tell.

  Boyer remarked that people he has talked to are angry at the DNR, or at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or at the pulp and paper and mining companies. He thinks it’s inevitable that when such people tell stories they incorporate their grievances into them. And up north he finds more of that sense of resentment.

  Northern Wisconsin also hosts a fair number of lumberjack ghosts, given that the logging industry took quite a human toll in its early days. In other parts of the state, Boyer explained, ghost stories are generated by what he terms “industrial themes” such as railroading, which has resulted in tales of vanishing brakemen and ghostly steam trains.

  Phantom hunters seem to be a bit more prevalent in Wisconsin than, say, phantom hitchhikers, one of the most frequently recurring ghost tales in other parts of the globe.

  Hunter ghosts are common owing to the frequency of tragic accidents or other, more sinister events.

  Boyer believes these particular hunter stories have an underlying theme. In feudal Europe all wild game belonged to the crown or aristocracy, and commoners caught hunting could be prosecuted for poaching. The punishment could have been imprisonment, torture, or even death. Therefore, immigrants to Wisconsin had little tradition of hunting game upon which to build but embraced it “with a vengeance,” Boyer explained.

  “Ghostly hunter stories are told with zeal. And people can be proprietary about them. They’re told within families. The family goes to the same hunting shack every November and grandfather tells the story” of the ghost hunter who’s still seen out in the forest.

  Boyer quite naturally points to his own region, southwest Wisconsin, as being particularly rich in ghost stories.

  “Among those early lead miners there was a wild west environment that didn’t exist elsewhere in Wisconsin, and probably one that didn’t exist much anywhere else east of the Mississippi. It was almost a Dodge City milieu. When you hear about the knifings, the shootings, the card brawls, it was pretty wild and woolly. And there were public executions that drew thousands of people in a way that doesn’t even seem like Wisconsin.”

  For all the abundance of Wisconsin’s ghosts, however, most of them are more temperate beings than those found in other regions of the United States.

  Boyer said ghost stories he heard as a child on the East Coast had an edgier, more macabre quality. “[ In Wisconsin], people look at [ghosts] like guardian angels. By and large their experiences are fairly benign. I’ve found only a few in the tradition of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ where there’s some relentless pursuer. Other than that, they are watchful, sentinel types that appear to be looking after things. Even the ones that are agents of mischief don’t seem that malignant.”

  In 1962, folklorists Robert Gard and L. G. Sorden claimed that Wisconsin had more ghosts per square mile than anywhere else in the United States. While a supernatural census has never been attempted—and is probably not even remotely possible—Boyer thinks Gard and Sorden were right.

  “I don’t think there’s anyplace else that on a statewide basis has more ghosts,
from the Illinois state line right up to Lake Superior.”

  Although he cautioned that most of his conclusions are tentative, Boyer believes the reason for Wisconsin’s supernatural abundance may have more to do with the state’s diverse ethnic mix than with a climate particularly well suited to visitors from the beyond.

  “I think that as people came up from Missouri, and the Yankees were coming out here, at the same time you got all the settlers from Norway and Germany bringing with them lots of traditions.”

  But that’s only part of it, Boyer said, especially for those ghost stories with strong rural themes. He pointed to a strong Native American presence in Wisconsin, for instance, much stronger than in Eastern states where the Native populations are remote from the present in both time and space. In the American West, the settlers and Native populations were antagonistic, the transition to white settlements more violent and unsettled.

  “Here in Wisconsin, despite the Blackhawk War and the short-lived Winnebago War, there were more protracted interactions [ between Native Americans and white settlers] from as far back as the time of the French voyageurs. Because I focus on the environment, many Native American legends [interconnect] easily [with non-Native ghost stories] because there are many natural themes, such as the names of places where spirits are alleged to inhabit.”

  Boyer noted that when European Americans retell stories that began as Native American legends, they tend to lose the spiritual character with which the Native Americans may have originally invested them, and to assume the light-heartedness more typical of European stories. The ghost at the center of the tale shifts from being a religious symbol to being merely the source of a good scare. That’s particularly true of the spirits who evolved from benevolent beings in the original Native American accounts into malevolent specters in the European versions.